New Cancer Treatments May Be On The Horizon—Thanks To mRNA Vaccines
Back when people first heard about Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines, the mRNA technology behind them sounded like the stuff of science fiction. But while the mRNA approach seems revolutionary, long before anyone had heard of COVID-19, researchers had been developing mRNA vaccines to fight cancer, autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, and to protect against other infectious diseases, such as the respiratory syncytial virus. “It’s not a new idea: What COVID has shown us is that mRNA vaccines can be an efficacious and safe technology for millions of people,” says Daniel Anderson, a leader in the field of nanotherapeutics and biomaterials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.